1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to methods and systems for utility usage, monitoring and management.
2. Description of the Related Art
With serious concerns regarding global warming on the rise, civic and corporate efforts to improve energy conservation have steadily increased. Major US cities, for example, have independently vowed to reduce their emissions level to 7% below 1990 levels by 2012. New developers, perhaps in response to rising market and civic pressures, have started to adhere to standards set by the US Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program. Finally, many corporations are initiating green corporate energy marketing campaigns and increasing green product lines wherever possible.
In response to increasing media coverage of global warming, the average consumer's desire to reduce carbon emissions is at an all-time high, with 61% of the population seeing global warming as a real concern. Unfortunately, there are no cost-effective and systematic ways today to convert this desire into a rigorous, measurable conservation effort. On one hand, typical and easy ways for individuals to conserve resources are very hard to quantify (e.g., taking shorter showers). On the other, serious conservation efforts (such as solar energy conversions) are very expensive and require significant lifestyle changes. Furthermore, when consumers do try to conserve, they are unable to see the impact of their collective efforts. This lack of information discourages conservation efforts, and may partly explain why most people rely on corporations and the government to spearhead the majority of green initiatives.
Within this context, what can make a big positive difference to individual conservation efforts is an energy management solution that would allow consumers to easily track their electricity use at the level of each appliance or each socket, so that consumers can pinpoint personal conservation opportunities based on their everyday activities. Granularity of data at the appliance level is critical because people interact with individual appliances, rather than with the whole home or office at any given point in time. This means that the energy management system needs to be flexible to work under all typical residential and commercial usage patterns, e.g. ability to freely interchange appliances for “plug-and-use” with the energy management solution and ability for the system to identify what is being plugged in.
Furthermore, what is needed is a cost-effective and accurate means of aggregating individual usage behavior up to a population level so that consumers can see the cumulative impact of their conservation effort and understand how much more they may be able to save relative to their peers. Again, aggregated data would be most useful if obtained at the level of each appliance, since this would allow for meaningful comparisons across users and populations. For example, “How much energy has a community of users saved in the past month by raising their wall air conditioner temperature setting by 2 degrees F?” or “Which appliances are the most energy efficient under real-world usage patterns?” To enable this, the energy management solution would have to incorporate a systematic and objective way of assessing, validating and learning which type of appliance is responsible for the electricity consumption data collected through each outlet using an outlet monitoring device.
The present invention addresses these concerns.